Celebrating the Brilliance of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber

Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber doesn’t speak until the 25th minute of Die Hard, and when he finally does, it’s with the insouciant menace of a bad guy already tiring of his role. That pre-speech little shoulder drop, the raised hand, the weary “Ladies and gentlemen” as he calls for quiet like a Wimbledon chair umpire and begins the long con of exceptional thief masquerading as international terrorist—his performance-within-a-performance is Mr. Rickman’s postmodern Dr. No to Bruce Willis’s blue-collar Bond. Rickman, who died Thursday at the age of 69, didn’t make Hans Gruber the first seductive Hollywood villain, but he may have been the last to fully seduce us. While American audiences are suckers for accented erudition and tailored suits, our love runs shallow; we want to see the elitist eventually get his comeuppance, preferably at gunpoint, preferably by a working stiff who does it the hard way.

Bruce Willis’s John McClane does it the hard way. He runs barefoot over broken glass and suffers the indignities of being shot, gut-punched, face-kicked, and karate-chopped. He swings from firehoses and crashes through windows. He falls down stairs and crawls around ventilation ducts. Meanwhile, Hans Gruber sits behind a desk, surrounded by beautiful men with beautiful guns, issuing commands in that glottal hybrid of German and Received Pronunciation English (an accent my friends and I coined Die Hard–speak). Of course we rooted for Hans the entire time. He had us at that little shoulder drop, at the off-hand mention of his classical education, and especially at his impatience for the trope he has been forced to play. This is not ironic posturing; Alan Rickman’s brilliance, the silky vigor that ran through every role he inhabited, was the result of empathy. He loved his characters. We suspected, we hoped, he would love us too.

Genius often results in a surfeit of adjective-noun pairings; blame this on the writer’s struggle to capture an ability beyond his grasp. Alan Rickman’s star in Hollywood’s vapid constellation might dim over the decades, because he seemed to have no interest in the kind of fame or scandal that can build up a legend over time. He waited for us to come to him, and if we didn’t, c’est la vie, so ist das Leben. But with every viewing of Die Hard that memory of Rickman will bloom into a supernova; Alan Rickman is dead, Hans Gruber lives on. It’s a paltry compensation. I’ll take it.